Did the "12 Angry Men," set a guilty kid free...nice article...

[billc]

This article looks at the movie "12 Angry Men," the jury debating movie and analyzes Henry Fonda's (playing Juror #8) arguments as to why the kid accused of murdering his father should be set free. The author looks at each of the arguments and disects them...cool...

http://www.avclub.com/articles/did-12-angry-men-get-it-wrong,83245/

So what if they probably let a guilty man go free?
Clearly, Reginald Rose, who wrote the original teleplay as well as the film script, intended the unnamed defendant—we’ll just call him The Kid, as the jurors generally do—to be innocent. There isn’t some hidden twist that nobody’s ever noticed until now. But in attempting to make the scenario as dramatic as possible, Rose inadvertently and unwittingly made it almost impossible for The Kid not to have killed his old man. Is he guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt? No.

Here’s the evidence that The Kid committed murder, as discussed by the jury in the film:

• A few hours before the murder, The Kid was heard loudly arguing with his father, at one point shouting words to the effect of, “I’m gonna kill you!”
• An elderly man in an adjacent apartment testified that he saw The Kid flee the murder site immediately after he heard the old man scream.
• A woman who lives across the street from the murder site testified that she actually saw The Kid stab his father to death through the windows of a passing elevated train.
• The Kid’s alibi for the time of the murder was that he was at the movies, but when questioned the very same night, he couldn’t remember any details of the pictures he saw—titles, stars, anything.
• The murder weapon—a switchblade knife—was, by The Kid’s own admission, identical to one he owns, and had been seen in his possession. The Kid claimed to have lost his knife that very night.

Rose, an expert at dramatic construction, has his hero, Juror No. 8 (Fonda in the movie), undermine each of these pieces of evidence individually, assisted along the way by those who’ve defected to the Not Guilty camp. Some items in this impromptu defense are more persuasive than others.

For example...

Far less impressive is the discussion of The Kid’s faulty alibi: Fonda challenges Marshall to account for his actions on each of the last several nights, going back further each time Marshall succeeds, then feels vindicated when Marshall finally gets the title of a film he saw four days earlier slightly wrong (The Remarkable Mrs. Bainbridge vs. The Amazing Mrs. Bainbridge) and stumbles over its no-name stars. It wasn’t even the film he’d actually gone to see (which he names without hesitation), but the second feature.

None of this ultimately matters, however, because determining whether a defendant should be convicted or acquitted isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be—a matter of examining each piece of evidence in a vacuum. “Well, there’s some bit of doubt attached to all of them, so I guess that adds up to reasonable doubt.” No. What ensures The Kid’s guilt for practical purposes, though neither the prosecutor nor any of the jurors ever mentions it (and Rose apparently never considered it), is the sheer improbability that all the evidence is erroneous. You’d have to be the jurisprudential inverse of a national lottery winner to face so many apparently damning coincidences and misidentifications.

Here’s what has to be true in order for The Kid to be innocent of the murder:

• He coincidentally yelled “I’m gonna kill you!” at his father a few hours before someone else killed him. How many times in your life have you screamed that at your own father? Is it a regular thing?

AND...

You'll have to read the rest to see how interesting this article is...